27 October 2013

Against a background of the leaks about NSA spying, transparency
-- or lack of it -- is a hot topic at the moment. But there are
situations where it can be even more important than just a matter of
enhancing confidence in government actions and acting as a check on
them, as this Wired story about Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) makes clear:

As Techdirt has reported, the attempts to extradite Kim Dotcom from New
Zealand to the US have turned into one of the most catastrophically
bungled legal cases in a long while. One of the biggest scandals to
emerge was that New Zealand citizens had been wiretapped
in an effort to gain evidence against Dotcom, since domestic spying was
forbidden there just as it is in the US (oh, wait...). Unfortunately,
rather than rapping knuckles and telling the local spooks not to do it
again, the New Zealand government has instead just brought in new legislation to make it legal in the future.

As more and more countries start introducing Web blocks, some people
console themselves with the "at least there's always Tor" argument.
Politicians may be slow, but they are not all completely stupid, and
they are beginning to get the message that Tor and other anonymous
services potentially render their Web blocks moot. It's then not a huge
leap for them to move on to the next stage -- banning or blocking Tor
-- as Russia now seems to be contemplating, according to this article on Russia Today:

Over the years Techdirt has run a number of stories
that make it abundantly clear that you don't own those ebooks you paid
for. But in case you were still clinging to some faint hope to the
contrary, here's a cautionary tale from Jim O'Donnell, a classics professor at Georgetown University.
He is currently attending the IFLA World Library and Information
Congress in Singapore, and naturally wanted to bring along some serious
reading material; ebooks on an iPad seemed the perfect way to do that.
As O'Donnell explains:

When Techdirt wrote recently about yet another secure email provider opting to close down
its service rather than acquiesce in some future US government demand
to spy on its users, we noted that Cryptocloud has promised something
similar for a while -- what it terms "corporate seppuku":

Two years ago, Techdirt reported on a very troubling ruling
in the UK courts that BT had to block access to the Usenet service
provider Newzbin2. At the time, many feared that this would be the thin
end of the wedge, giving copyright companies an easy way to shut down
other sites. And with that power, of course, would come the inevitable
errors, blocking completely unrelated sites. Just how seriously those
mistakes could be is shown by this recent case of massive overblocking, reported here on PC Pro:

Techdirt has published a number of posts that explore the issue of whether art organizations
can stop people sharing images of works in their collections when the
latter are indisputably in the public domain. Even if museums might be
able to claim copyright in their "official" photographic images, the
more important question is whether they ought to. The good news is that
some institutions are beginning to realize that using copyright
monopolies in this way contradicts their basic reason for existing -- to
share the joy of art. Here, for example, is a wonderful statement of
that principle from the Getty Museum entitled "Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come":

Prefixing concepts with the epithet "open" has become something of a
fashion over the last decade. Beginning with open source, we've had
open content, open access, open data, open science, and open government
to name but a few. Indeed, things have got to the point where
"openwashing" -- the abuse of the term in order to jump on the openness
bandwagon -- is a real problem. But a great post by David Eaves points
out that the spectrum of openness actually extends well beyond the variants typically encountered in the West:

You may remember a rather wonderful court case from 2012 that pitted
copyright lawyers against patent lawyers over the issue of whether
submitting journal articles as part of the patenting process was fair
use. Well, we now have the judge's decision, as GigaOm reports:

The use of Web blocks -- usually "for the children"
-- is becoming depressingly common these days. So much so, that many
people have probably come to accept them as a fact of online life. After
all, the logic presumably goes, we can't do much about it, and anyway
surely it's a good thing to try to filter out the bad stuff? Techdirt
readers, of course, know otherwise, but for anyone who still thinks that
well-intentioned blocking of "unsuitable" material is unproblematic,
the following cautionary tale from the British blogger W.H. Forsyth may prove instructive:

A couple of months back, Techdirt wrote about Australia's proposals to shift from the current fair dealing approach to fair use
as part of wide-ranging reform of copyright there. When something
similar was mooted in the UK as part of what became the Hargreaves
Review, it was shouted down by the copyright maximalists on the grounds
that it would lead to widespread litigation.
As Mike pointed out at the time, that's nonsense: the existence of a
large body of US case law dealing with this area makes it much easier to
bring in fair use without the need for its contours to be defined in
the courts.

Techdirt has noted the increasing demonization of hackers (not to be
confused with crackers that break into systems for criminal purposes),
for example by trying to add an extra layer of punishment on other
crimes if they were done "on a computer." High-profile victims of this
approach include Bradley Manning, Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown and of course Edward Snowden.

One of the central problems of laws that deal with copyright is that
they are essentially products of a time when the distinction between
creator and audience was clear-cut. The move to digital and the rise of
the Internet has changed all that, allowing hundreds of millions of
people to become new kinds of creators. They may not write entire
symphonies or paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but what they
lack in scale and intensity they make up for in frequency and
spontaneity.

Around the world, we have been watching the gradual taming
of social media, especially in countries where governments keep
mainstream media on a tight leash. But even against that background,
this news from the Bangkok Post about Vietnam's latest moves to censor online content is pretty extraordinary:

Last week we wrote about how the Russian equivalent of SOPA had been amended in order to ban swearing
online. Although that was worth noting for its entertainment value,
probably more important is the fact that the same law -- originally
brought in to take down sites about drugs, suicide and child pornography
-- has also been widened to include copyright infringement, as TechWeekEurope reports:

One of the heartening recent developments in the world of digital
copyright is that we have moved on from manifestly biased surveys about
the evils of piracy and how the solution to everything is harsher
punishment for infringement and longer copyright terms, to independent
analyses that seek to understand rather than judge and lecture. There's
also been a new focus on learning what the public thinks might be an
appropriate balance for modern copyright -- something that nobody cared
about in the past.

One of the myths perpetuated by governments taking part in major
international treaty negotiations like ACTA, TPP and TAFTA/TTIP is that
somehow no national sovereignty is given up during the process, and that
therefore the public shouldn't worry about what goes on in those secret
meetings. That's clearly absurd, because negotiations involve
concessions, usually by the weaker parties, which often touch on
national competences.

As a recent DailyDirt noted, opinions on the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
are sharply divided. But that heated argument tends to obscure another
problem that Techdirt has often written about in other fields: the use
of patent monopolies to exert control, in this case over the food chain.
By inserting DNA sequences into plants and animals and obtaining
patents, the biotech industry is granted surprisingly wide-ranging
powers over how its products are used, as the Bowman case made clear. That's potentially problematic when those products are the foods that keep us alive.

Techdirt has run a number of posts about David Cameron's dangerous plans to apply default online censorship and make porn opt-in in the UK, supposedly to "protect the children". Now it looks like Peru is following suit (original in Spanish):

26 October 2013

Two massive trade agreements currently being negotiated -- TPP and
TAFTA/TTIP -- could potentially affect most people on this planet,
either directly or indirectly through the knock-on effects. Like all
such agreements, they have been justified on the grounds that everyone
wins: trade is boosted, prices drop, profits rise and jobs are created.
That's why it's been hard to argue against TPP or TAFTA -- after all,
who doesn't want all those things?

There are few areas in tech policy where the waters are so muddied as
those swirling around net neutrality. That's as true for the EU as it
is for the US. The latest statement by the person responsible for this
area in the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, does little to clarify things.

Last week Mike wrote how frustration at the unremitting secrecy
surrounding TPP, and the refusal to allow members of the public in
whose name it is being negotiated to express their views, has led to the
creation of a new participatory Web site by the "Fair Deal Coalition."
Many of the best-known groups fighting for more balanced copyright laws
in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have signed up, including
Techdirt.

A year ago, we wrote about a Russian law
that introduced a blacklist designed to block access to information on
drugs, suicide and child pornography (all for the children, of course.)
Strangely, that same law was then used to silence leading reporters who dared to criticize the government (bet nobody saw that coming....)

The story of open data in the UK has been fairly uplifting in recent
years, as more and more public datasets are released under liberal
licences. Even the big holdouts - things like Ordnance Survey - have
gradually loosened their grip. The same is true for the Postcode
Address File (PAF), which has a surprising long history:

At the start of this year I flagged up
the likelihood that hugely important trade negotations between the EU
and US would start in due course. A few months later, I gave some more background to that move, as well as the text of a document calling for the participants to avoid repeating the grave mistakes of ACTA, which ultimately led to that agreement being rejected in the European Parliament on July 4 last year.

Yesterday I wrote
about the slide into censorship and self-censorship that the UK
government's misbegotten plans to impose a default set of Net blocks
could bring about. Of course, the UK is not alone in seeking to
introduce disproportionate schemes. Here's one from Russia:

Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock, you will have
heard and probably read plenty about the UK government's grandstanding
proposals to make pornography opt-in. I won't waste your time by going
through the many reasons why that is a foolish idea and won't achieve
the things the government says it will. Instead I'd like to concentrate
on some disturbing hints about where this could be going, and why we
need to start fighting any such plans now.

In the wake of Microsoft's dire
financial results, it might seem a little unsporting to draw attention
to more of the company's problems. But its continuing stranglehold on
companies and governments around the world means that such measures are
justified, not least because people are suffering as result - millions
of them.

I've been trying to fathom what exactly Neelie Kroes, Vice-President
of the European Commission with responsibility for the Digital Agenda,
intends to do about net neutrality in Europe for a while. Back in
January of this year, I asked: "Will Neelie Kroes Defend or Destroy EU Net Neutrality?", and in June I was still wondering: "What's the Net Net on Neelie Kroes's EU Net Neutrality?"

Back in March, I wrote about the odd little attack
by the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on
Mozilla's plans to put control of cookies firmly in the hands of users.
Alas, the IAB seems not to have come to its
senses since then, but has instead doubled down, and launched one of the
most bizarre assaults on Mozilla and the open Web that I have ever
read. I warmly recommend you to read it - I suspect you will find it as
entertaining in its utter absurdity as I do.

About a month ago, I wrote
about the extraordinary fact that Microsoft routinely hands over
zero-day exploits in its applications to the US government for the
latter to use in the short window before they are announced and plugged.
On thing that allows is for "foreign" governments and companies to be
targetted and various levels of access to be gained in a way that is
hard to protect against.

A year ago the European Parliament rejected ACTA -
a real milestone in the fight to bring some balance to copyright, since
it was the first time that a major international treaty was thrown out
in this way, largely because of its one-sided and disproportionate
approach to that area.

As you will have noticed, European politicians have suddenly become rather interested in the revelations about NSA spying now that it seems that they, too, have been targeted.
This led to a three-hour long debate in the European Parliament
yesterday, which was striking for the number of speakers calling for the
imminents TAFTA/TTIP trade negotiations to be
postponed until after the US has responded to the allegations - and
promised to behave better in the future.

The UK is famous for its abundant CCTV cameras, but it's also pretty
keen on the equally intrusive Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)
cameras that can identify cars and hence their owners as they pass.
Here, for example, is what's been going on in the town of Royston, whose
local police force has just had its knuckles rapped by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for the over-enthusiastic deployment of such ANPR systems there:

At the beginning of last year we reported on a Swedish study that showed that streaming services had halved
the number of people who were downloading music illegally in
Scandinavia. That's a pretty stunning figure, but of course is only one
data point, which means that people can always argue that it's not
possible to generalize. So it's good that not just one but two new
reports confirm and broaden that finding.

A few months ago we wrote about the extraordinary -- and worrying --
case of Eli Lilly suing Canada after the latter had refused to grant a
pharma patent. Eli Lilly's contention was that by failing to grant its
patent (even if it didn't meet the criteria for a patent in Canada),
Canada had "expropriated" Eli Lilly's property -- and that it should be paid $100 million as "compensation".

One of the striking features of the Snowden story is that there has been
no serious attempt to deny the main claims about massive, global
spying. Instead, the fall-back position has become: well, yeah, maybe
we did some of that, but look how many lives were saved as a result.
For example, the day after the first leaks appeared, it was suggested
that PRISM was responsible for stopping a plot to bomb the NYC subways.
However, further investigation showed that probably wasn't the case.

Two of the key arguments during the Myriad Genetics
trial were that gene patent monopolies stifle innovation by preventing
others from building on and extending key knowledge, and that they can
cause unnecessary suffering and even death by driving up prices for
medical treatment beyond the reach of many people. Even though the
Supreme Court struck down Myriad's key patents, reducing those issues
for DNA, a new technology with major ramifications for health runs the
risk of suffering from precisely the same problems.

One technique in the world of pharma that has started appearinghere
on Techdirt is "evergreening" -- making small changes to a drug, often
about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its
manufacturer's control over it. The advantages for pharma companies
are evident, but what about the public? What economic impact does evergreening have? That's what a fascinating new paper in the open access journal PLoS Medicine seeks to establish:

As we've noted before, many publishers have the crazy attitude that
ebooks shouldn't be lent by libraries, and that it should be made harder for people to access literature in these places if it's in a digital form. Over in the Netherlands, public libraries have had enough of this, and are taking legal action over the issue, as an article in Future of Copyright reports:

Big pharma often gets a rather rough ride here on Techdirt, what with
its attempts to stop governments granting licenses for life-saving and
low-cost generics in emerging countries, engaging in legal action to prevent drug safety information being released, and paying kickbacks to doctors. But sometimes you get the impression that drug companies really go out of their way to be disliked, as this great post by Josh Bloom on the Medical Progress Today site, pointed out to us by John Wilbanks, demonstrates

Today, the European Parliament held a three-hour long debate on PRISM,
Tempora and what the EU response should be. Many wanted TAFTA/TTIP put on hold;
others didn't. But one theme cropped up again and again: the need for
strong data protection laws that would offer at least some legal
protection against massive and unregulated transfer of Europeans'
personal data to the US.

As the growing number of Techdirt stories on the subject testify, drones
are becoming a more familiar part of modern life. But their presence
can add a new element to situations. An obvious example is during
demonstrations, where drones can be used to monitor those taking part --
but also the authorities' reaction. As with cases where members of the
public have used smartphones to capture police abuse, so drones offer the possibility of revealing questionable police activity that might in the past have gone unrecorded.

In the past, Iran has provided plenty of light relief here on Techdirt, whether because of plans to build its own Internet, or thanks to weird stuff like this. But it looks like those days are over
following the election of a surprisingly-moderate President, Hassan Rouhani. Here, for example, are his thoughts on Net filters, as reported by The Guardian:

Although nobody seems to know what Edward Snowden is up to at the
moment, there have been plenty of reactions from others to the earlier
revelations about US spying in Europe.
Alongside the outrage, there is also a certain gratitude towards
Snowden in some quarters for providing information about what has been
going on. For example, one of the local wings of the German Pirate
Party has suggested that he should be awarded a Federal Order of Merit (original in German.) In France, a surprisingly broad spectrum of politicians are calling for him to be offered political asylum according to this report from France 24 :

Open standards has been a recurring theme here on Open Enterprise.
It's also been the occasion of one of the most disgraceful U-turns by
the European Commission. That took place in the wake of the European Interoperability Framework v1, which called for any claimed patents to be licensed irrevocably on a royalty-free basis. But when EIF v2 came out, we found the following:

On Wednesday I wrote
about the Houses of Parliament deciding to use cloud computing
solutions, despite the fact that we now know - not just surmise - that
this is like handing your documents to the NSA.
As I noted, that may not be problematic if your documents were going to
be in the public domain anyway. But of course, that's only the case
for a tiny fraction of most companies' documents. And for those, it is
clearly the height of irresponsibility to place them with cloud-based
systems that are wide open to demands from the US government for any and
all data to be handed over, decrypted where possible.

Last week I wrote about the perils
of using proprietary software, where companies regularly hand over
zero-day vulnerabilities to the US authorities who then go on to use
them to break into foreign systems (and maybe domestic ones, too, but
they're not owning up to that, yet....). Of course, cloud-based
solutions are even worse, as we've known for some time.
There, you are handing over all your data to the keeping of a company
that may be on the receiving end of a secret US government order to pass
it on to them - perhaps with necessary encryption keys too.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.